One of the key pillars of QUEST, the 490H course, looks different this semester in the wake of the COVID-19 crisis. In the new reality of remote-learning, and the changing working arrangements within companies, the way that teams and clients interact with each other has drastically changed. However, Cohort 31 is stepping up to the challenge and working hard to continue our efforts of providing insightful recommendations for our clients.

Teams gave their first status update presentations on March 11th, during what would become the final week of in-person classes for the semester. There are eight projects this semester with a variety of corporate partners: DXC, Intralox, Lockheed Martin, Middle River Aerostructure Systems, Northrop Grumman, PAE, and Thos. Somerville.

There are two projects with Middle River Aerostructure Systems (MRAS) this spring. One of the projects focuses on analyzing defective parts at MRAS’ ProWarehouse, and the other project focuses on identifying bottlenecks in the First Article Inspection approval process. Through communicating more frequently and establishing recurring meetings with clients, Kellie Zhang (Q31) is proud of her team’s adaptability. “The FAI process is a big pain for many employees as rarely do things get approved the first time through, so our project could help smooth out the process,” Kellie said. “I think the most exciting thing will be seeing the impact we can have!”

With Northrop Grumman, the team is working on improving information flow between stakeholders. Success for this project requires lots of interviews with stakeholders at their Elkton site, so the team has utilized virtual resources to continue their progress. Anusha Dixit (Q31) describes, “The changes in our schedules have allowed for more time to debrief before and after client calls, and our project champion has been instrumental in setting up interviews with employees. We even had a virtual site visit, interviewing many stakeholders and gaining a lot of valuable insight. Gaining these snapshots into the work that the employees at Northrop Grumman do and seeing how their roles fit together to accomplish a larger collective goal (of making rockets!) was incredibly cool.”

The project with Thos. Somerville involves improving traceability of inventory adjustments. The team hopes to benefit their client by providing reasoning and awareness for over half of their inventory adjustments. Amara Kamal (Q31) hopes this awareness will continue after the project is completed. “We’re providing more transparency in their inventory adjustment process for hopefully years to come.” The team feels confident about working on the project remotely, especially since they had already done their site visits in the first half of the semester. Amara finds one of the most exciting parts of the project to be working with the company’s C-suite. “We get to speak with the people who, at the end of the day, get the final say, and it’s really exciting to hear about their process and reasoning behind creating value-added strategic change to a business with 20 branches and a central distribution center.”

Additionally, there are four more projects working with DXC, Intralox, Lockheed Martin, and PAE. The project with DXC focuses on using design thinking methods to design a system for future military engagements leveraging new technical capabilities such as machine learning, 5G networks, and high performance computing. The team working with Intralox is tasked with analyzing the current state of metadata throughout a product’s life cycle, then suggesting an improved process where Intralox and its systems can better leverage these findings and effectively use and share data across all stages of the product life cycle.

The project with Lockheed Martin focuses on their Moorestown, NJ work center, and the team is working with QUEST alumnus Nick Gregorio (Q19). The team will utilize their skills to optimize the use of the work center’s footprint and provide recommendations for how to continue investment in the work center to support continued future growth. The final project is sponsored by PAE and involves improving the defense and government contractor’s process of international material flow, particularly their delivery of materials to the embassy in Baghdad, Iraq.

Cohort 31 has made incredible progress so far, in spite of the unprecedented changes this semester. It will be exciting to see how this semester’s projects come together in the final few weeks! Although the QUEST Conference scheduled for May 7th has been canceled, be on the lookout for updates on how Cohort 31 will present their findings virtually.

Rapidly dropping temperatures this fall are accompanied with rising excitement for this semester’s QUEST capstone projects for 490H! Cohort 30 will have a chance to demonstrate all the skills they have developed over the last two years when working with their industry clients, from developing a design-thinking mindset and honing their data analysis skills to presenting innovative solutions with clarity and expertise. The clients this semester hail largely from the engineering industry, where process improvement and modification remains a high priority.

There are three projects with Northrop Grumman this fall at different sectors of the company in Maryland. The company has sponsored 18 projects since 2009 and is always a great partner. The first project is the investigation into the accuracy of a model designed to predict system-level failure and how it can be improved. Northrop Grumman Mission Systems, which sponsored this project, has also sponsored previous QUEST capstone projects, including in spring 2019. The two other Northrop Grumman projects are based out of the Elkton, MD plant that used to belong to Orbital ATK. One project is the assessment of the dock-to-stock delay and how to mitigate this occurrence through a new process and accompanying change in standards. The process of checking each product received by the company before adding it to stock is a lengthy one, and any delay can build up into a bigger problem if encountered. The final Northrop Grumman project is focused on the analysis and improvement of Northrop Grumman’s scheduling process. Optimizing this system will allow for reduction in production time, increase in quality, and improved customer satisfaction.

The other five projects are from a variety of companies. Leidos, Thales, and Middle River Aircraft Systems are both aerospace and defense-focused companies, with QUEST alumni involved as project champions at the former two. Krishang Sharma (Cohort 23) is championing the Leidos project, and Steve Kutchi (Cohort 1) is championing the Thales project. The project with Leidos involves the implementation of technologies to enable the transfer of knowledge to non-subject-matter experts through a chatbot or similar system. The project with Thales involves an investigation into the company’s configuration management release process and tools and provide recommendations to enhancing efficiency of the process and metrics to monitor. With Middle River Aircraft Systems, the team will be identifying problems in the supply chain and helping to reduce supplier delinquencies for a part of a thrust reverser produced. Oceaneering (OTECH) develops and operates unique marine systems for the government. The project involves improving vendor interactions through data collection and process improvement. The team is working with QUEST alumnus Jeff Gamerman (Cohort 12). The final project is sponsored by the Sealed Air Corporation, a North Carolina-based food and product packaging solutions well-known for Bubble Wrap^®. The project involves the investigation into the benefits and cost of modifying the process of storage of materials to be placed in silos. The team is working with QUEST alumnus Joe Dadzie (Cohort 23).

This semester’s projects are as groundbreaking as ever. Cohort 30 will be presenting their final recommendations on Thursday, December 5th from 6-8:30 PM at the Samuel Riggs IV Alumni Center on campus. If you’re interested in seeing their innovative recommendations, be sure to register for the conference at go.umd.edu/questconferencefall19.

Silicon Valley is known for its tech innovation, engineering culture, and startup ecosystem, but to QUEST students, it’s also known as the destination for the annual spring break trip. Each year, a group of QUEST students enrolled in BMGT438G/ENES489Q travel to the Bay Area on an enriching journey full of knowledge, career insights, and fun.

But with all of the travel opportunities available at UMD, why choose QUEST2SiliconValley? Ankita Sahoo from Cohort 30 explained that she wanted to see Silicon Valley from a QUEST perspective since it would help her actively network with and learn more about the lives of QUEST alumni on the West Coast. Having been on other trips through UMD, she said, “QUEST2SiliconValley stood out since it was a lot more career-oriented and students were able to build meaningful connections with employees at companies like Uber, Google, and Tesla.” On the other hand, Michael Khizgilov from Cohort 29 said QUEST2SiliconValley was his first trip through UMD. He chose the trip since he’d never been to the West Coast and wanted to “experience firsthand how companies in Silicon Valley set themselves apart and innovate successfully.”

The trip this year consisted of various site visits, brunches and dinners with alumni, and free time during which students could go sightseeing in San Francisco and Palo Alto. Visits included Uber, Compology, ABC News, Autodesk, DoorDash, Genentech, Facebook, Ideo, Ford, Google, Verizon Media Group, and Tesla. Each student was responsible for researching one of the companies and planning out the logistics for that company’s site visit. Ankita Sahoo (Q30) was in charge of planning out Genentech. She discussed plans for the visit with the Genentech point of contact beforehand, went over the types of discussions and activities to be done that day, and made sure that QUEST students could take a tour of the office. Students were also responsible for analyzing each company’s development processes and recording their findings in a final report. The class ended with a final presentation to the QUEST community to showcase how fun and insightful the trip to Silicon Valley was.

The main purpose of the trip is to let QUEST students experience what the corporate culture of the West Coast is like. It gives students a great opportunity to see Silicon Valley from the eyes of those who actually work there. It’s also a great opportunity to visit the West Coast and see what it’s like before you choose to work there full-time. Dan Selzer from Cohort 27 will be working with Amazon in Seattle starting this July and said he learned a lot since he was able to “visit companies that could potentially be [his] future employers.” He explained that the site visits “made [him] more comfortable about [his] decision to work at a tech company on the West Coast.”

All in all, QUEST students had an amazing time on the West Coast this Spring Break. Be on the lookout and sign up for Design and Innovation in Silicon Valley next Spring so you too can join in on the fun!

To view more photos from the trip, click here!

After a lot of thought and hard work, QUEST’s Applied Quantitative Analysis course (BMGT438A/ENES438A) really came to life this semester! In the tradition of QUEST having “a track record of experimentation and innovation in the classroom, the data course is no different,” according to Executive Director Dr. Joe Bailey. Since former Director Kylie King saw an opportunity for QUEST to do something innovative with data a few years back, QUEST has been developing a data class as a way to prepare its students for the analytical work to be done during 490H and post-graduation. Co-taught by Dr. Joe Bailey, Professor David Ashley, and QUEST alumnus Josh Kohn (Q18), the class features each professor bringing the best of their knowledge in data analytics; they rotate weekly to teach the students everything from running linear regressions to understanding the data behind artificial intelligence. According to Professor Ashley, this course is a “good opportunity to showcase data management [and] authenticate other statistics classes.”

Each week, students learn vast amounts of information and techniques surrounding statistical analyses. However, this class is unique in that the majority of it is application-based. Professor Ashley favors a hands-on approach so that students possess a “skill set to recognize when to use each method and the meaning it provides.” He wants to see storylines behind the data sets to understand why they are important rather than equations lacking context.

Brianna Ho from Q29 says her favorite part of the class is “how wide the breadth is and how we can learn so much in such a short amount of time.” She said, “We’re able to learn things that are applicable to different classes like how to use Excel and also more conceptual topics like Josh’s lecture on machine learning and AI.” Although there is so much to learn and we cannot become expert data scientists in one semester, Josh Kohn says a goal he has for the students is “to learn the key topics and buzzwords so [they] can dive deeper if [they] want to… and be able to have an intelligent conversation.”

The students are not only getting to apply what they learn to in-class exercises, but they are also working on some great projects with real clients. This course has gone “from a 1-credit offering to what it is today — a 3-credit course with approximately 40 students all doing experiential projects,” says Dr. Bailey. All of the students are formulated into groups working for Leidos, Unilever, Google, the US Office of Personnel Management, the Boys and Girls Club, and the US Patent and Trademark Office. Charles Grody from Q29 finds that what he most loves is that “there is so much to explore” and is challenged by deciding when to “go in depth to answer one question or when to try and answer several.”

To highlight some of the projects, the Google team entered the company’s Kaggle competition which involves producing the best model for describing the data set. This year, the premise of the competition involves figuring out how much an average customer spends at the Google store. The group for the US Patent and Trademark Office is looking at data to find interesting trends regarding patent application conversion rates in order to better understand the variables that predict whether or not a patent application will be accepted. The Unilever team is studying datasets from the biggest ice cream factory in the world to better understand aspects impacting waste factor in an effort to reduce it without sacrificing a high level of service. The Leidos team is examining artificial intelligence tools that can be used to improve pilot workflows. The Boys and Girls Club group’s goal is to analyze donorship data, from understanding what categories are doing the best to what trends can be seen amongst the donors.

Anna Xi (Q29) feels like the most important skill she has learned so far is that “dealing with large amounts of data means finding strategies to consolidate the data into different categories.” Students ultimately receive raw data and convert them into stories by sorting through and cleaning up the data. These stories provide an understanding that allows inferences to be drawn and relayed to the clients. Josh called this course “very QUEST-y” as students are “blending technology with business context.”

The QUEST student experience culminates in the capstone course, 490H, and as time has gone on, the projects have become more challenging, especially with the data involved. The Applied Quantitative Analysis course gives students a huge advantage in order to create a more level playing field. Data analysis will no longer be burdensome for students as they work through their projects. Kohn believes that “once it clicks, [students] will be amazed at the variety of problems [they] can analyze,” and it’s this moment in the course that is Dr. Bailey’s favorite as he says, “It is at that point that the course material isn’t just surface-level learning.” Furthermore, this course is very applicable to many QUEST students’ future goals as the ability to apply the methods learned goes a long way beyond QUEST and into many careers.

Josh Kohn said, “The world is becoming increasingly data-driven and generating more data points than companies or governments know what to do with. You can apply these skills to any industry you choose and understanding statistics pays many dividends.” In conjunction with that, Dr. Bailey sees that “every major within QUEST is shaped by the move towards analytics.” All in all, speaking from personal experience, the Applied Qualitative Analysis course has certainly been challenging, but I have learned so much and have simultaneously gotten to see all my knowledge being put to use.